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Corinthian Gauntlet
Corinthian Gauntlet is an AI-controlled Jaeger which operates as part of the Arctic Defense Corps. History Origin The development history of Corinthian Gauntlet stretches back well before any of its contemporaries - all the way back to 1970, when the USSR's State Laboratory for Extranormal Warfare had been commissioned to create an all-terrain autonomous walking vehicle for use in propaganda, counterinsurgency operations and extranormal threat response. While Project Gauntlet made a promising start, the following decade saw ever-greater demands placed upon the design team by over-eager general staff along with the cancellation of numerous parallel projects both mundane and paranormal resulted in that bane of all projects of this sort: scope creep . Successive design drafts gradually evolved from a quadruped walker to the "bipedal tank" shape (which would itself see later revival) and subsequently to a humanoid form, all the while constantly growing in volume and mass to accommodate more and more equipment. In 1980, a full proposal was finally submitted for review, promising that the long development cycle and high research costs had been put to good use designing a weapon of unmatched power - as well as excessive construction cost, impractically large size in the context of many of its original intended roles and migraine-inducing logistical requirements, as quickly became apparent to everyone who so much as skimmed the document. It also required the investment of numerous extranormal assets that could not be replicated, many of which the Party preferred to keep for further research. A one-off eigenweapon, no matter how much power it concentrated at the tactical level, was simply not considered worth the cost, and doubly so when it was so large and heavy that any kind of fast strategic transport was implausible. The response from the Red Army and the Central Committee was accordingly cold (Though accounts of Brezhnev personally stamping "REJECTED" on every single page of the grant request are likely hyperbolic), contributing substantially to the Laboratory's fall from favour and eventual dissolution in favour of other extranormal research groups. Across subsequent decades the assorted documents would be irregularly moved between locked cabinets and rooms in various facilities for state secrets and extranormal intelligence; the files were opened with ever-increasing rarity and by all accounts those few citizens of the Russian Federation who viewed them retrospectively took the proposal no more seriously than its original Soviet-era audience. By the time of Operation Pitfall, Project Gauntlet was gathering dust in a bunker in Vologda, an unremarkable member of a collection of oddities that required no extraordinary procedures to keep safe and out of sight. Project Gauntlet re-activated Some months after the conclusion of the Pacific conflict the decision was taken to declassify much of the documentation related to the long-abandoned Project Gauntlet under the cover story that it had been developed in the late 2010s rather than the 1970s. Much of what had been considered top-secret paratechnology in the previous century was now common knowledge following the advent of the Jaeger program; structural supermaterials, directed-energy weapons and the concept of a giant humanoid fighting machine had all conclusively left the realm of science fiction, and in the context of 2026 the Gauntlet blueprints would seem like an unremarkable first attempt at a subpar Jaeger design. Only the proposed computer cores remained classified - while data gathered as a consequence of brain-computer interface technology had accelerated AI research, a device which could in theory simulate the subjective human experience without a single electronic component was well outside the contemporary definition of normalcy, even after that had been so thoroughly upended by the Kaiju and everything around them. In 2044 these declassified papers caught the eye of Arctic Defense Corps Second Marshal Kerwiller, who obtained access to the remaining classified files as soon as possible and transferred them to the Quartermaster with orders to "modernise, rework for our purposes and get it built". Quite why the ADC chose to appropriate a design over half a century old, scarcely plausible in its own time and largely obsolete in theirs, would never be satisfactorily explained by any credible source within the organisation, but the fact remains that where Project Gauntlet had taken ten years to produce their bloated mess of a proposal the ADC and the Canmore Laboratory needed only four to streamline it into viability; another two were occupied by construction and fitting but by 2050 Corinthian Gauntlet was ready to patrol the Arctic ocean alongside its manned cousins. Siege of Novoya Zyemlya soon Technical overview Defensive systems Corinthian Gauntlet's armour consists primarily of spaced layers of titanum-iridium alloy and ceramic composites, one of the few features retained from its original 1980 design. The 2048 redesign introduced modern miniaturized technology to free up substantial amounts of weight and volume, allowing fragile internal components to be encased in Hex-Carbide Duranium and Diamond Hyperweave Impact Mesh and. Armament Quagmacaster Ironically, where the original Project Gauntlet mounted dozens of different mundane and paratech weapons to the point that it could not be considered to have a single primary armament, the redesigned Corinthian Gauntlet was built around one specific weapon: the Quark-Gluon Plasma Caster, the result of a collaboration between United Arms and the Canmore Laboratory which was never put into serial production due to a subsequent stew of intellectual property arguments. The project combined UA's time-tested large-scale engineering expertise with CanLab's advanced power generators and Atomic Crucible technology in an attempt to produce a thermal weapon capable of outputting even higher temperatures than nuclear explosives and Ionised Gaseous Plasma Casters. An Atomic Crucible installed in Gauntlet's torso generates dense quark-gluon plasma heated to several trillion degrees Kelvin before feeding it to the head-mounted projector which launches it at near-relativistic velocities, either focused in globs or streams within a projected containment field or in an unconstrained cloud which disperses across a wide arc. In addition to these bolts, beams or expanding blasts of quagma, the (barely) controlled thermodynamic anomalies exploited by the Atomic Crucible are also manipulated by the projector; as a result each shot is accompanied by cascading chromodynamic fluctuations which enhance the already catastrophic effects of the weapon against targets not protected by Intrinsic Field Regulators. Secondary weapons Gauntlet is primarily a ranged fighter due to the raw power of the Quagmacaster, and its other weapons are appropriately oriented toward capitalizing on its advantage in long-range engagements. A quad-barrelled array of fully automatic mortars adorns each shoulder, capable of firing Additional Information Quotes By About